I am gainfully employed and getting back into the UX world.  I attended a talk at Google a couple of weeks ago, and am refreshing my interaction design memory.

We are back in Boston, and welcomed by a huge blizzard.  Some updates:  a paper that my colleague Chris LaRoche and I wrote last year was accepted to the 2010 IPCC Conference in the Netherlands, the Dumas and Redish book I ordered is in the mail and on its way, and the job outlook is positive. 

I am thankful for my health, my family, friends, and having so many opportunities.  Currently, we are in Colorado, still on the road, and celebrating Thanksgiving with my family.  We will be back in early to mid-December, unless we find jobs first!

I am still on the road, and will be back in the Boston area in about a month.  It's exciting to wake up every morning and not know where we will end up for the day and the evening.  I am starting to read old journals and books from grad school, and getting back into thinking about my career goals.   Continue following our road trip on our travel blog:  bzroadtrip.wordpress.com.  And if any of you know of a job in the Boston area, please feel free to email me.

As some of you may know, I will be taking time off of work and school to travel across the United States.  I will be going with Ben Bornstein, and our travel blog:  bzroadtrip is up and running.  Although we won't be departing until around the 8th of October, we decided to set up the blog and discuss our preparation procedures.  Even though I am taking a break from the user experience world, and my professional world, I am still doing SOMETHING.  Right now I am working on reviewing some submissions for the 2010 UPA Conference in Munich.  Good luck to all those who submitted!!!  Please check out our travel blog at:  bzroadtrip.wordpress.com.

Imagine you are an entrepreneur with a great idea.  You also love to garden.  You have a crazy friend who flunked plant physiology, but speaks very confidently about a subject you know nothing about.  Now imagine the two of you decided it's time to tear down the old shower curtain in your apartment and make a planter to grow tomatoes upside down.  Phenomenal.  Some time later, after a flurry of back patting, meetings with commercial producers and advertisers, your product is being sold on TV to urban organic fiends who want their own gardens but lack the space.  Finally, imagine a tomato blight occurs.  The same kind of blight that wiped out potato crops in Ireland at the turn of the last century.......read more.

I have added more to my portfolio.  My final semester at Bentley I took a course on ethnographic research methods in applied fields.  I have grappled with this concept (refer to my update from May 29, 2009).  I found the class exercise--to conduct ethnographic research and report findings--to be applicable in the user research setting.  Despite some continuing questions I have on the topic, I felt I was able to gather information to suggest minor changes to a local non-profit organization's entrepreneurial sector.  Check out the final report here.

Check out my latest blog post:  http://zarlaludin.wordpress.com.

In a couple of days I will be heading out to the 2009 UPA Conference in Portland, OR.  This year I took a course in ethnography, and since then have been interested in its adaptation into user-centered design.  At this years conference I will be presenting a poster on the history of ethnography in its source discipline of anthropology.  My poster is a timeline of what I have deemed important events, issues, debates, etc. in ethnography.  On the actual poster I have citations, but no full works cited.  Click here to see my poster.

My classmate/colleague/friend Martha Kam and I presented at the Boston mini-UPA conference earlier this week.  Our topic was a bit controversial, although we attempted to keep our stance on the topic neutral.  The subject:  using ethnography in user-centered design.  The presentation was organized as a lively debate.  We brought up issues and debates in ethnography in its original fields of anthropology and sociology, and asked the audience questions about their thoughts on using ethnography in user-centered design.  The discussion was heated and as we hoped, lively.  We are happy that this dialog was brought up at a local level, and we hope discussions like this continue.  Click here to see our slides.